The Adopted
Production year: 2011
Country: France
Cert (UK): 15
Runtime: 99 mins
Directors: Melanie Laurent
Cast: Clementine Celarie, Denis Menochet, Marie Denarnaud, Melanie Laurent, Theodore Maquet-Foucher
The first feature to be directed by Mélanie Laurent, best known in the English-speaking world for her playing the French heroine of Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, is a soft-centred, romantic movie of love and family life in provincial France. In its whimsical, bittersweet way it's very like Les parapluies de Cherbourg and Les demoiselles de Rochefort without the music.
In this case the pretty young women are two sisters living in Lyon, one adopted, the other a single mother with a delightful little son, both close to their tough handsome mother. The adopted girl, Marine, manages a bookshop specialising in Anglo-Saxon literature. The first time she appears, she and her boyfriend, Alex, a restaurant critic, re-enact a French version of the bookshop encounter between Bogart and Dorothy Malone from the film version of The Big Sleep, which rather sets the general tone. The single mother, Lisa (played by Laurent herself), writes sad folk songs and works in a music shop. All three characters obsessively watch Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade. It's a wispy, tasteful, mildly touching, very French affair.
